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Tuesday, May 28, 2013

The Oedipal crisis Sigmund Freud

Each stage has certain difficult tasks associated with it where problems are
more likely to arise. For the oral stage, this is weaning. For the anal stage,
it's potty training. For the phallic stage, it is the Oedipal crisis, named
after the ancient Greek story of king Oedipus, who inadvertently killed his
father and married his mother.

Here's how the Oedipal crisis works: The first love-object for all of us is
our mother. We want her attention, we want her affection, we want her caresses,
we want her, in a broadly sexual way. The young boy, however, has a rival for
his mother's charms: his father! His father is bigger, stronger, smarter, and
he gets to sleep with mother, while junior pines away in his lonely little bed.
Dad is the enemy.

About the time the little boy recognizes this archetypal situation, he has
become aware of some of the more subtle differences between boys and girls, the
ones other than hair length and clothing styles. From his naive perspective,
the difference is that he has a penis, and girls do not. At this point in life,
it seems to the child that having something is infinitely better than not
having something, and so he is pleased with this state of affairs.

But the question arises: where is the girl's penis? Perhaps she has lost it
somehow. Perhaps it was cut off. Perhaps this could happen to him! This is the
beginning of castration anxiety, a slight misnomer for the fear of
losing one's penis.

To return to the story, the boy, recognizing his father's superiority and
fearing for his penis, engages some of his ego defenses: He displaces his
sexual impulses from his mother to girls and, later, women; And he identifies
with the aggressor, dad, and attempts to become more and more like him, that is
to say, a man. After a few years of latency, he enters adolescence and the
world of mature heterosexuality.